


Fortiores Una

by Tayine



Series: The Man from UNCLE Continuation [3]
Category: The Man From U.N.C.L.E. (2015)
Genre: Angst, Canon Compliant, Character Death, Espionage, Gen, Historical References, Hurt/Comfort, Medical Trauma, Mission Fic, Multi, Post-Canon
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-05-15
Updated: 2018-08-07
Packaged: 2019-05-07 06:36:09
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 2
Words: 10,871
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14665365
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Tayine/pseuds/Tayine
Summary: Four months after their narrow escape at the hands of their recent foes, the three premiere agents of UNCLE are deployed on a new affair in the tropical paradise of Hawaii. By all appearances, this adventure will be easy: find the informant who approached them and hear what she has to say. Of course, nothing is simple in the hate-filled fight of the Cold War. Old enemies rear their heads in the confusion of the beginning of the Vietnam War, and a shadow organization is building among the ruins of the group they nearly gave their lives to stop. To top it off, Napoleon, Gaby, and Illya must finally come to terms with the relationship that exists between the three of them, and they have to do it fast, before one of them is lost for good.





	1. Allegiance

The girl in their condo took the glass of Scotch that Napoleon offered her and gulped it down, shuddering slightly at the afterburn and licking her lips. She smiled, said, “It’s not too bad when you’ve gotten used to it,” and jerked forward, dying in a splash of blood and brain matter.

Gaby was sitting in the middle of the couch, facing the girl’s back, and lunged for her when she began to fall, going high into the path of the open window. She hadn’t been able to see the instantaneous dulling of the girl’s eyes as she died, like Napoleon.

Illya, leaning in repose on the couch’s arm, wrapped one arm around their partner’s middle and threw her quite viciously to the floor, joining Napoleon there where he’d dropped. “No sound,” he said.

Napoleon agreed with a hum in the back of his throat, rolling onto his side to free his weapon. “No more,” he said after a moment of listening to the gulls squawk and the waves sigh.

Gaby covered her mouth with a hand and turned her face into Illya’s shoulder, still lying beneath his arm. She’d spotted the blood.

Napoleon turned his head, angling his ear to the open window beside the terrace doors. The wall of their hotel suite that faced the beach was made up mostly of glass and wooden framing, and there was no sight protection for them if the shooter decided to come up closer to their back porch. He raised himself up, snatched a mustard-yellow throw pillow from the couch, and held it by one corner, shaking it full in frame of the window. Nothing happened.

He glanced at his partner, received a confirming nod, and combat-crawled to the terrace doors, sneaking a peek out the bottom corner panel of glass. From this angle, the empty beach seemed to spread for miles, sloping down and away so that he couldn’t see the gentle waves lapping at the sand. He reached for the handle, his arm completely exposed, and tugged it, opening the door with a violent push as he snaked backwards, hiding again.

When nothing happened, he resettled into a kneeling crouch, his gun out, and peeked around. The private beach was empty.

“It’s clear,” he breathed.

Illya got up, but Gaby stayed on the ground. “Why?” she asked, bringing herself up to her knees, her hands fisted on her thighs.

“That is a million-dollar question,” Napoleon sighed, holstering his handgun.

Illya was inspecting their informant, but it was quite clear she was beyond help. He patted her down, checking her pockets and the folds of her sundress.

“Anything?” he asked, coming over and holding a hand out to Gaby, who looked up at him, took his hand, and stood.

“No. Not even a wallet.”

“She didn’t have a purse when she came,” Gaby said, having noticed this small detail.

Napoleon went back to the terrace doors, on edge and prickly with an agent’s shame and anger at being caught off-guard. He stepped out onto their patio, brushing his hand against the grip of his revolver at the small of his back, and stepped out onto the compacted sand and grass that led to the beach proper.

A row of bungalows identical to theirs stood like soldiers along the crest of the beach, looking down at the gentle slope towards the waterline. It was the very end of the off-season, and tourists wouldn’t flock here for another month at least. For now, the big island of Hawaii was calm, peaceful – as mild as paradise was expected to be. For all his experiences with the CIA and UNCLE, Napoleon had not come to this mission with the expectation of watching a young girl have her brain blown out in front of him.

He took a moment to feel some sorrow at her death, but that was all, and he went out onto the sand, searching the miniaturized dunes for the valleys of footsteps. The shot had come from far away, almost definitely from a sniper rifle of some sort. If he had been standing inches to the left, he would have been a secondary casualty, wounded high in the chest. Their informant had been short, standing in front of him, and she’d been looking up at him with trust –

“The shooter?”

Illya’s voice, behind him. Napoleon shook his head, not bothering. He pointed out towards a ridge of seagrass, his arm straight and held along the path the bullet had taken in its flight. The beach curved around, a concave shape. “Up there, no footprints.”

They went anyway, though, because they were UNCLE and they had lost something valuable to them. They walked in silence, side-by-side, digging their loafers into the sand. It was early afternoon, the sun climbing to its peak, with a gentle breeze that smelled of rain.

The beach grass was spiny and short, with tough blades that popped back into place after being disturbed. Napoleon stood beside his partner, his arms akimbo, looking directly into the room of their bungalow. Gaby stood framed in the doorway, watching them. It was a far shot, taken by a professional, nearly seven hundred yards. No sound, no chance at a chase. They were foolishly exposed, with hundreds of nooks and crannies for another attempt on them now as they stood in the open, and yet weren’t being shot at. The assassin was long gone with his mission complete.

“UNCLE will want to be told,” Illya said gruffly.

Napoleon nodded, looking away into the reaches of the island now, wondering where the shooter had come from, where he had gone. Wondering how he had known to follow the girl, why he hadn’t shot the three of them as well. Anyone willing to pay an assassin to kill her would have wanted UNCLE agents dead as well. It didn’t make any sense.

They returned to their bungalow, where Gaby had covered the girl with a sheet from one of the beds. Blood had seeped into the cotton, leaving a stain to the side of the girl’s skull as she lay on her stomach, sad and ruined. Gaby was standing in the open kitchenette, drinking more of the Scotch they had purchased at duty-free, her back to the body.

“We know her name,” Napoleon said. “We know she wanted to speak with UNCLE. She knew us as an organization, which means she was a part of something that opposes us. We know why she was killed.”

“Does that make a difference?” Gaby asked without turning.

Napoleon paused, knowing it was not the right time to be snippy. “Maybe not to her being dead, but maybe to avenge her.”

“We don’t care about her. She was an asset. We don’t want revenge on her behalf. We want to get whoever did this to cure our own egos.”

“Gaby, what’s the matter with you?”

She laughed, a pitch higher than normal. She set her glass down on the Formica counter, walked to the front door of the bungalow, and closed it behind her with a snap, all without turning to look at them.

Napoleon cast a bewildered look at his remaining partner. Illya was standing with his arms crossed, two fingers drumming on his forearm, his face shadowed, but he didn’t follow Gaby, which Napoleon appreciated.

There was a heavy knock on the front door, made with the bottom of a fist, not knuckles. Napoleon swung around to look back at it, feeling like a spinning top today. Gaby wouldn’t knock to come back in.

“Open up!” A male voice, accented.

“Police,” murmured Illya.

“For Christ’s…” Napoleon went into the bedroom he and Illya had shared, came back with a leather briefcase, and followed Illya out the back door, just as the front door crashed inwards.

The two UNCLE agents jogged around the side of the bungalow, keeping their heads low. There was heavy landscaping between the rentals, full of broad-leaved tropical plants, but the police had shown up in force. They skulked, waiting.

They had a rental car, a two-door Rambler with a dented bumper, which they had left parked in the dirt driveway leading to the bungalow’s front door. Illya was the faster runner of the two of them, and he went off down the narrow two-lane road that wound along the coastline of the island. Napoleon hunkered down with the briefcase, watching the officers give chase, taken by surprise. Gaby had left a mere seconds before the police had knocked on the door – had she been detained? Napoleon lifted his head to peer around a decorative boulder and spotted her, handcuffed, glaring daggers at the two policemen flanking her. She was being helped into the backseat of one of the dark blue wagons, but she was going quietly. Napoleon was more disturbed by this than anything else that had happened today – which probably told tales about Gaby’s outburst that he didn’t care to explore at the moment.

The rest of the force that had arrived to the crime scene had followed Illya, their tires squealing, and Napoleon waited a moment before duck-walking to their car. He ducked his head behind the door, opening it sideways and throwing the briefcase into the floor. He slithered onto the seat and fished the keys from his pocket while lying along the bench seat, keeping his profile low. He heard the rumble of a police car starting up, a few words tossed between the officers who had stayed behind to investigate the original reason for their summons. They had discovered the girl’s body in the bungalow. He considered his options, ultimately deciding to let Gaby stew in lockup for a while. There was no point in attempting a rescue – these were honest men doing their job, and any effort he would make to free her would result in some sort of harm to them. No reason in antagonizing Hawaii’s finest, especially since they would probably end up needing them at some point. Bureaucracy was as fine a weapon as a handgun, and Waverly relished brandishing it.

Napoleon waited until the officers who had stayed behind again went through the demolished front door, sweeping the interior for any remaining ne’er-do-wells, then he put the rental car into neutral while still lying sideways, unable to see out the windows or any of the mirrors. The car rolled backwards gently, bumped onto the slick asphalt of the two-lane road, and waited there while he turned the engine over and drove away, finally upright.

He found Illya waiting at one of the safe spots they had arranged, looking more disgruntled than usual. He was sitting on a bus bench, one foot propped over one knee, trying to look as casual as his size would allow.

“Gaby was arrested,” Illya informed him as he got into the front seat.

“I know. We’ll get her later.”

“Later?” Illya spat.

“Later,” Napoleon said calmly. “Waverly can get her out.”

“Breaking her cover.”

“We’re out of Hawaii by tonight, now. There’s nothing left for us to do here.”

“The shooter-”

“Is long gone, I assure you.”

“You know your pretending to know everything is getting very old, Solo.”

“Oh, Peril,” Napoleon sighed. Then nothing.

The trouble was they were tired. The enemies they had disrupted in London, the enemies they had killed in Istanbul, the ones in Rome: all were dead, and yet, like the Hydra before them, three more popped up when one was stopped. All three agents, hell, all of UNCLE, knew that this wasn’t a situation in which there was any sort of end. Governments and anarchists and villains would be around until the end of humanity itself, and there would always be a need for people to do the sorts of things that the UNCLE men and women did. They understood their end goal was to do well, do right by their countries, and live to retire. It was this drive that had kept them going, but it was also this knowledge of their Sisyphean work that kept them from enjoying it. They would never be truly done, not until they were told to stop, either by their superiors or a bullet. And their work had been less fun lately. Napoleon had always liked the finer things in life, but the hours he spent in his apartment in New York, surrounded by opulence that he had worked hard to earn (or steal, or scam away) had been empty. He couldn’t remember the last time he had been pleased with life.

They drove into the city center, a hotbed of tourists seeking their pleasures and locals earning their keep off them. They drove slow, avoiding pedestrians in flip-flop sandals and unbuttoned shirts who weaved through traffic like the crowd in a bar. Napoleon spotted the police station, made a mental note of its location and size, seeing in almost one instant the exits, windows, and any surfaces or ledges which appeared climbable, and continued past, puttering past the knickknack shops and cheap restaurants.

One phonecall to their superior later, Napoleon and Illya shared a bench facing the water and a footpath, the sand beneath their feet warm and inviting. Illya was stewing; Napoleon was licking a shave ice in a paper cone, crunching the flecks of snow between his sharp white teeth.

“She is alone in there,” the Russian grunted. The disapproval was coming off him like a stench, in waves of musk and aftershave that must have come from behind the Iron Curtain.

“She’s fine.”

“I did not say she was in _trouble_. I said she was _alone_.”

“Waverly told us to stay put.”

Illya muttered something very rude in Russian, which Napoleon primly ignored, knowing it would irritate him more. He flicked his tongue at the shave ice, attempting to work at a piece without compromising the integrity of the structure. It was melting in the heat, and he’d had to lick cherry syrup off his thumb twice already. In the corner of his eye, he noticed Illya watching this.

 The sun was very high now. They wouldn’t leave the island until the cover of darkness, where one small jet leaving the tarmac at Hilo wouldn’t attract as much attention. Gaby would be joining them then. Waverly had instructed them to keep their heads low, enjoy the sights, and for-the-love-of-God, not leave any more bodies behind. This involved playing tourist as much as the two of them were comfortable doing. This in turn involved the waiting game – leading to Napoleon’s icy treat while they sweated beneath a tropical sun.

They had been sitting there for nearly thirty minutes when Illya leaned forward, uncrossing his legs. He touched Napoleon’s forearm.

“I see him,” Napoleon said, low and grave.

A boy, no older than eighteen, had just passed by their bench for the second time, first going one way and then the other. He hadn’t paid them any particular attention, but his pace had increased during the moments when he was directly in their line of sight, and his forward shoulder had come up, just a bit, like he was hunching away from them seeing his face. It was poor tradecraft, and his inexperience caught their attention.

Napoleon stood up, shoved his hands into his pockets, and strolled away down the path, opposite from the direction the boy was traveling. Behind them, the busy boulevard of tourists was full to the brim, the sidewalks thick with bodies. Napoleon dissolved into it.

He circled around and ducked into an alley, quick now that he wasn’t burdened by the weight of the briefcase from the bungalow or any prying eyes. The ground behind the stores was damp and splashed up onto the hem of his slacks.

A fist passed by his nose, an inch from hitting him. He reeled back, unbalanced, and was struck by a second blow into his side, below the ribs. He spun on his toes, angry at being caught unawares twice in one day, and threw punches of his own. The man in front of him was big, ugly, and apparently without morals – he swung a kick up to Napoleon’s groin. The CIA officer saw stars and fell to the ground.

Squinting through watering eyes, he saw the glint of a needle, a grotesquely thick syringe holding a cloudy liquid. He swung his legs around, caught the man low, and toppled him to the ground beside him. He wasn’t able to get up himself, but he did roll over and break the man’s grip on the syringe with both hands, plunging it deep into the stretch of tendon between neck and collarbone. The man grunted, shivered, and his head fell back.

Napoleon pushed up onto his knees, his hands on his thighs, his head hanging. He felt like he was going to vomit. After several long breaths, he climbed shakily to his feet and staggered, holding the wall of the building backing up into the alley. He hadn’t had a blow like that in years.

When he felt recovered, he continued on his way with a lot less spring in his step. Wherever the boy had gone, he had almost surely missed him. He couldn’t decide if the boy was bait, a target, or both. He circled around the entire block of souvenir shops and came out onto a cross-street leading back to the main boulevard, following it back to Illya’s bench facing the waterfront. When he made eye contact, a few yards from joining him, his partner stood and closed the distance between them.

“Who was he?”

“Didn’t get that far,” Napoleon said. His voice was jagged. “Some brute with a sleeping potion found me first.”

Illya’s brow came down low in concern. He had seen the change in his partner’s demeanor. His hands came up as if in preparation to catch Napoleon as he swooned. “How much did you get?”

“None, but I did get laid out with a nasty hit to the rocks.”

Illya winced in sympathy. “Gaby will be next.”

“Yup, we gotta go.” Napoleon took a step, hunched over and gagged, and recovered. They returned to their rental car, Illya sliding into the driver’s seat this time.

At the police station, they flashed badges and ID cards, documents they had reserved for only the most dire need. The desk sergeant wasn’t happy to see them, or to hear that he had mistakenly arrested a fellow officer whose agency was so secret it didn’t even have a name he could know, but he led the two of them back to the holding cells, hitching his gun belt over his substantial belly.

The cells were in a hallway with three on each side, old-fashioned barred walls and doors lining the corridor. As soon as they stepped through the heavy door the sergeant unlocked, Napoleon heard a sharp cry of alarm.

He shoved past the sergeant and ran the length of the hall, stopping at the last cell on his left. The door to the cell was open, with Gaby and a stranger inside. He barreled in and got the stranger in a headlock from behind, yanking him backwards. The syringe in his hand fell to the floor and broke, spilling the cloudy liquid inside. Gaby was shaking with a bloody lip, but she stood up as Napoleon pulled the man backwards and clanged into the barred wall of the cell.

The sergeant had the man cuffed on the ground in a matter of moments. He was red-faced, too stubborn to apologize but too afraid to argue when Illya said, in a heavier accent than usual, that he needed to excuse himself for a moment. “Five minutes,” he said. “But I want him back.”

“In five minutes he’ll be all yours,” Napoleon said. He waited until the sergeant went back through the holding cell door and shut the door to the hall with a heavy clink before stepping forward.

The man who had assaulted Gaby had a similar look to the one he’d left in the alleyway, but this one was surrounded and outnumbered, and his glower was more sullen than arrogant. He sat on the metal cot against the far wall, facing the three of them like he was under judgement.

“Where you from?” Napoleon asked with a smoothness that didn’t betray the shiver-weak fear that had sparked in him when he’d heard Gaby cry out.

When he didn’t answer, Illya stepped forward and slapped him open-palm across the face.

“Who sent you?”

No answer, and another slap.

“Why the three of us?”

No answer, and this time a punch that drew blood. Beside him, Napoleon felt more than saw Gaby turn her face away.

“How did you get our names?”

No answer except the tiniest smirk, which must have set off something in Illya, because he went forward again, dislocated the man’s shoulder, and stepped back into their line without changing the expression on his own face.

The prisoner screamed now, but Napoleon knew at once they weren’t going to get anything out of him. They had the ability, sure, but not when he was under the jurisdiction of the small hometown police department. The kind of information-gathering that he and Illya were good at was much more effective when no one else knew where the informant had gone. He stepped forward and looked into the man’s eyes, clouding his face with warning. “Tell your superiors we know they’re coming. Tell them to try us.” Then he stepped back, nudged Gaby, shot a warning look at Illya, and led the two of them out. He slammed the door to the cell and went to the door leading back into the station proper, knocking on it. When the desk sergeant opened it, grumpy, the UNCLE agent said, “Make sure to add assault on an officer to his charges. Oh, and when you book him in formally, mind that broken shoulder he got during the scuffle of his arrest.”

The desk sergeant grunted, nodded, and seemed very pleased to have them out of his station as they left.

Illya was walking close to Gaby as they went around the building to their car. He said something to her that Napoleon didn’t quite catch as he opened the driver’s side door, but he heard her quiet chuckle and was glad for it.

There was a plot of landscaping at the head of the parking lot with large-fronded palm leaves and other tropical plants. One of the long branches jiggled slightly as Illya and Gaby made it to the car, and Illya disappeared into the brush in a flash. Napoleon was half-inside the car already, and he had to heave himself back up to stand straight again, sighing deeply.

Their partner returned with his large hand around a boy’s neck. It was the same one from before. He was barely eighteen, a skinny twerp with jet-black, shaggy hair. He was Southeast Asian, with an unhealthy pallor to his skin and dark circles under his bright eyes. He was upset that he’d been caught but not struggling, like a disciplined puppy. Illya opened the passenger side door, shoved the kid bodily into the backseat, and replaced the seat upright so that he was trapped.

Napoleon joined him inside the car and turned to face the boy. Gaby stood beside Illya as he got in as well, glowering.

“Explain,” Napoleon said.

“Where’s Nhi?” the boy asked tearfully. “She wasn’t outside the house when I came back to pick her up, and the rest of you were gone.”

“Who are you?”

“Hoang. Nhi’s my sister.”

“Did she tell you why she was meeting us?”

Hoang dropped his gaze, nodded, and put his hands together in his lap.

“Can you give us the information she was going to?”

He shuddered out a breath. “Where is she?” he whimpered, like he already knew the answer.

“Someone killed her,” Illya said.

Hoang nodded again and his face screwed up.

“We’re sorry we couldn’t protect her,” Gaby murmured.

“That was my job. She’s… she was my sister. I shouldn’t have left her alone, but she insisted that she had to do this.” Hoang put his face into his hands and cried quietly, his thin shoulders tucked like a black hole inside him was pulling him in.

“Hoang, this is very important. We are going to catch whoever did this, but we need to know why Nhi called us. How did she know to contact our agency?”

“I don’t know where she got the name UNCLE-” – the three officers shared a glance between them – “-but she said it was her duty to tell you what she knew.”

“Which was?”

“I don’t know. I swear!” He looked up in fear, perhaps expecting to be struck. Napoleon suppressed a flinch. “I swear I don’t know. All she told me was that she needed to contact UNCLE.”

“We believe you,” Gaby said, playing good cop. “Can you tell us anything that might be helpful?”

“Where are you from?” Illya asked, leading in that vein. “Where could she have come by this knowledge she needed us to know?”

“We were born in Hanoi, but our parents brought us to Hawaii when I was a baby. Nhi was only a toddler. We were raised here, schooled here. She went to Viet Nam last summer to see our relatives, who I’ve never met. When she came back she was afraid of something. I knew something had happened, but she refused to tell me. She said she was keeping me safe.” His expression broke, and he cried into one hand again for a moment. “T-That was my job.”

Napoleon raised a hand, hesitated, and brought it down onto the kid’s shoulder. “Your sister and you are both very brave. She did her best to help us, and for that you should be proud.”

“I know. I am. I wish I could do more. I wish I could tell you what she knew.”

“We know, Hoang,” Gaby said.

The boy wiped his face, replaced his hands in his lap.

“Listen, whoever killed her was a professional. I’m sorry to say that Hawaii isn’t safe for you or your family anymore. I’m going to have people at your house tonight to move you.”

“It’s just me,” Hoang said softly. “Our parents died in a car accident a few years ago. Nhi and I have been… it’s just the two of us. Was.”

Napoleon looked away and back. “Then you’re coming with us.”

Hoang nodded, looking at his hands.

 

They left the island under the cover of darkness, their plane pulling up through a layer of cloud cover that misted the windows with crystals as they reached cruising altitude. Hoang sat beside Gaby, curled up in his chair with his head against the cabin wall. He hadn’t spoken much since their interrogation, and the things he’d gathered from his small bungalow that he’d shared with his sister had barely filled one rucksack.

Illya and Napoleon sat across from each other, each gloomier than the other. As far as missions could go, this was probably the worst they had both ever completed, and it was obvious that the ordeal was only just ramping up. They had two strings to follow: whoever had killed their informant and whoever had come to kill them. The first was connected to Vietnam somehow, which connected it to the Soviet Union, which possibly connected the second string in a bracelet strung with beads of revenge and espionage. Illya had kept a low profile in the months since he’d faked his own death, and it was telling that only he had been spared an attempted assassination. If anything, it was the single shred of good news that had come from the trip. Napoleon looked out the small porthole window as the glittering spread of Hawaii fell away and thought darkly, _Good riddance._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> If you got through this first chapter and perhaps recognized it, congrats! You're a true TMFU nerd. I did indeed take serious foundational inspiration from the original TMFU book spinoff #2: The Doomsday Affair. I loved the opening scene of that pulpy book so much I had to use a bit of it. Don't worry, the plot deviates majorly from the inspiration material. You won't see what's coming ;)


	2. Duty

Washington, D.C. was awash with blossoms and patriotic visitors this time of year, and settling in their hotel just a block from the National Mall wrapped the officers and their tag-along in comforting anonymity. Waverly wasn’t pleased with their newly-acquired witness, but he could hardly turn the boy away. Hoang was obedient and shy, and he allowed himself to be whisked away into the depths of the UNCLE D.C. field office without complaint. He would have to suffer several more hours of intense interrogation, but he seemed relieved to be in their care. Gaby recognized the quiet fear that he’d worn like a blanket around his shoulders. She’d felt that way too, once, before Alex Waverly had walked into her life and given her more to do than fixing cars while always looking over one shoulder, just in case. She spoke to her mentor for a moment over the phone in her hotel room, blessing the private phoneline and technological capabilities that her agency could afford. Then she put on some nice shoes and went down to the hotel bar.

Solo was there already, drowning his sorrows. She climbed onto the tall chair beside him, brushing his shoulder with hers as she settled. “It’s going to be a long week, I think,” she said.

His arms were braced on the polished counter, holding his drink to him like a baby blanket. He sipped at the alcohol and didn’t reply.

The bartender came to her, took her order – “Whatever he’s having, just double it” – and went away again without eavesdropping or hovering. He was good at his job. He’d probably worked in this city for his whole life.

Gaby looked about the room for a moment, sighing and people-watching, then turned back to Solo. “You’re quiet,” she said.

“Not much to say.”

She chuckled with some mirth. “You? Hard to believe.”

“You weren’t looking into her eyes.”

Gaby turned her face away. The bartender delivered her drink and took her money. She sipped at the alcohol – Scotch, like they’d been drinking in the bungalow on the beach. She was sure that was deliberate.

They sat in silence together for a while. Gaby knew he wanted her to leave, and that was precisely why she stayed. He finished his drink and ordered another. The bar behind them slowly filled, and a pianist settled onto his bench and began to play in the corner, light melodies of various origins.

“I’m tired,” he said finally, after twenty minutes. His second drink was empty.

She knew what this meant, too, and she didn’t reply. They were all tired. She leaned into him and tilted her head over, like she was going to lay it on his shoulder. He looked at her for the first time.

She closed the distance, planting a warm, dry kiss directly on his lips. They held it for a moment before breaking away. His blue eyes were bright in the dim, moody lighting of the room.

“We’re partners,” Gaby said. She wasn’t smiling, wanting him to hear her over the rushing of blood. “We look out for each other and we listen.”

Solo’s gaze flicked back and forth between her eyes before he nodded and turned his face back to the bar.

“I’m going to bed,” she said. She got up and kissed him again, on the depth of his cheek near his ear. She crossed the length of the room, deep within herself, and saw Illya. He was standing in the wide doorway leading from the hotel lobby. He’d seen.

She went straight for him, her gaze holding his. He watched her come, his face darkening as she approached and his head had to tilt down more and more. He was so damn tall. She stood directly in front of him, took hold of his collar with both hands, and pulled him down to her. This kiss was a bit more passionate, if only because that’s what this one needed in comparison. When they broke apart, Illya looked punch-drunk, which amused her. He was the one straight arrow of the group, and it pleased her to know he could still be pushed off-kilter.

“Good?” she asked him after releasing his shirt. He nodded once, his face inscrutable. She smiled. “Good. You should try it with him next, I can’t be the only one.”

Illya’s face flushed as red as his country’s flag, and Gaby left both of them there.

The next morning, she phoned into UNCLE’s phone system and waited to get patched through to Waverly’s temporary office he stationed himself in when he was on-site in D.C. She dressed and began eating a room service omelette with the phone perched off-the-hook beside the base.

“How’s the boy?” she asked around a mouthful when Waverly picked up.

Her mentor sighed. “Terribly upset, I’m afraid. He doesn’t know _who_ to be afraid of, which makes it worse. He camped out here overnight and doesn’t seem keen to leave anytime soon.”

“You know he’s an orphan.”

“Yes, he mentioned that.”

“Also that he’s eighteen.”

“…Yes.”

“Hm,” said Gaby, wanting Waverly to say it aloud first. The two of them waited each other out, but she couldn’t stop hearing the sound of his crying in their backseat. Finally, she could stand it no longer and said, “Same age I was.”

A deep sigh on the other end of the line. “Yes.”

“The CIA really does like orphans.”

“Gaby, we can’t take him. He’s not… he doesn’t have-”

“What? The stamina? The mindset? Those you can train into anyone. You know he has the will, Alex. He came to us for love of his sister. You can work that.”

“Good god, you’ve become a spokesperson.”

“I believe in UNCLE,” she snapped angrily. “I know what we do is the right thing. Even with _what_ we do. What I do.” She stood and walked to the window of her room, dragging the phone on its long cords. The National Mall spread wide before her like wings, the museums and people busy and wild and free. And safe.

The other end was quiet, but she could hear his breathing. “I’ll consider it,” Waverly said finally. “No promises.”

“Meanwhile, keep him safe.”

“Of course.”

Gaby told him her plans for the day and hung up, then walked down the hall to Solo’s room. He was up and fresh-faced, though there was a barrenness in his eyes as he patted away the alcohol of his aftershave.

“I’m going to look around the museums,” she said. “Join me?”

Solo considered her in the reflection of the mirror above the chest of drawers as he pulled out a shirt. He always unpacked his things into the bureaus, making himself at home in his many hotel rooms. Gaby preferred to live out of her suitcase and was consistently more wrinkled than he when she didn’t have hotel staff steaming her dresses. “Sure,” he said, beginning to disrobe the bathrobe tied around himself. Gaby rolled her eyes but didn’t turn away; that’s what he wanted.

Solo was amazingly sculpted, hairier than she’d pictured, and gleeful in his pride. When he bent to pull on socks, he did it with relish, turning his back unnecessarily so that the ridges of his ribs pulled beneath the muscle.

“Putting on a show,” Gaby said, wanting to deflate but not puncture his arrogance.

“You’re still here, aren’t you?” He wiggled into trousers and turned to her, shirtless. He was smiling, his eyes wicked, and he saw her gaze as it moved across his abs and pecs.

“I’m going to put shoes on. Meet me downstairs.” Gaby turned away from him and ignored his lascivious giggle as she closed the door behind her.

It was overcast when they stepped outside together, crossing the busy street and stepping onto Constitution Avenue. She was glad that she’d brought a thin coat with her.

They went into the brand-new Museum of History and Technology first. Gaby had been an average student during her studies as a child and hadn’t ever pictured herself enjoying the act of learning, especially about a thoroughly dry subject such as history. The problem was she hadn’t been a part of it yet. Now she was one of few, in a band of brothers so secret and so desperately important that sometimes she lay awake at night. The stress and importance of what UNCLE did would have been overwhelming if she didn’t share it. Maybe that’s why she had felt this sudden shift lately. While Solo and Illya struggled with combat fatigue, she was only just learning to embrace it. The girl, Nhi, had been something of a wake-up call. She’d known going to the agents was dangerous; she’d believed it was worth death. She’d gone anyway. Gaby felt a profoundly deep kinship with her and knew losing her before they’d had a chance to know each other would stay with her for the rest of her life. Her own momentary lapse in a combat mindset, when she’d snapped at Solo immediately after the killing shot, shamed her, and she vowed not to crack like that again, especially with her two partners so close to the edge as well.

The museum itself was cozy, busy, and so enjoyable that the two of them wiled away several hours without realizing it. After lunch, they crossed the grass and spent several more pleasant hours in the National Museum of Natural History. Solo was an agreeable museum partner, as he loved to hear himself talk and Gaby was more than willing to listen. Her feet began to ache near the end of the day, but the pleasant day off had been more than worth it.

They ate dinner together in a small restaurant around the corner from their hotel room. They discussed Illya, the art they’d seen, plans for tomorrow, Illya again. Later, so suddenly she couldn’t prepare for it, Solo cocked his head at her over his salmon, his eyelids low, his smile comfortable. He purred, “Last night was unexpected, but I’d never say unwelcome.”

Gaby took a slow breath, holding back from showing irritation. Leave it to him to approach things so straight-forward instead of leaving them unspoken. Bloody Americans. “I need you on your feet. You are a good agent, Solo. I hear one of the best ever. You can’t let something like Hawaii knock you down. I know, I know,” she said over his incoming interruption, seeing the flash of wounded argument as he frowned. “It was a tragedy, I’m not saying that it wasn’t. But we can’t let them win. It’s more important than ever that we stay strong.”

“Oh, and love bites do that?”

“They remind you of what you’re doing this for.”

Solo’s amusement faded. He stared at her for a moment, serious and quiet. Then his gaze dropped. He leaned back, took a prim bite off his plate, and said no more about it.

After dinner, they stepped out into a warm spring night well past sundown. It had grown humid throughout the day, the cloud cover trapping the swampy heat. It settled onto the skin of her arms as she immediately shed her coat.

“Want to walk around the Mall for a bit?” Solo asked, offering her his arm.

“My feet hurt in these shoes,” she said. “I’d like to get back to the hotel for a soak in the bath.”

“Just a quick turn.”

“No, I really want to-”

“C’mon, Teller, short walk.”

The use of her last name finally alerted her. She looked at him for a beat, her mouth slightly open as the threat registered. He wasn’t asking to be polite or to wile her guard down. There was someone else around, someone following them. She hadn’t seen a thing, but then again, she hadn’t been looking for it. How many times had she been tripped up by things that the other two took in as easily as breathing? She needed to do better.

But that was for another day. Right now they needed to deal with whoever was following them. She took her partner’s arm, her own slipping easily into his grip. He placed his other hand over hers and squeezed – a signal, a reassurance. They returned to the long rectangular footprint of the National Mall, walking along the wide, gravel path within the grassy boundaries.

Gaby lowered her voice but kept her demeanor calm. “How many?”

“Just one. Don’t think there aren’t more, though.”

“Same type of man?”

“Yup. That sleeping potion is gonna be in his pocket.”

Fear sluiced through her. The attack on her while stewing in the jail cell hadn’t been an assassination attempt. Whoever wanted them wanted them alive, transportable. She suppressed a shiver, wishing that she was armed. She didn’t like to carry her small revolver when she didn’t need to. Right now she forgot what her reasoning was.

Solo took them on a long, straight route down the footpath of the open-space Mall, free from tree cover or structures to hide behind. While here, they couldn’t be surprised, but the problem was to find a way back to the hotel – heading that way would take them onto congested streets and sidewalks, with plenty of civilians and corners to trip them up.

“What is the plan?” she murmured, leaning into his arm.

“We’ll have to run in, oh, three minutes.”

Gaby made a noise of agreement in her throat. She would have to kick off her shoes. Going barefoot on D.C.’s streets was less than ideal, but it was worth her life. “Tell me when.”

“I will.”

They approached the Washington Monument and diverted north. It was fairly late, with fewer tourists milling around the lawns. There was a copse of patterned trees just before the street which Solo seemed to be aiming for; he turned them abruptly and they headed in. The space between the trees was too far to use them as cover, but when they started running there was a chance they would be lost in the darkness.

“Now,” he said.

Gaby stepped out of her shoes and kept up with her partner, who slid his hand down her arm as they began to run and held her hand tight.

The man following them – Gaby had still not been able to spot him, but she believed Solo when he said he was there – gave chase. She could hear him pounding behind them as they jaywalked, weaving past the few cars going down Madison Drive. They had returned to the campus of the Smithsonian museums from earlier, and Solo brought the two of them off the path and into the landscaping around the buildings.

It was on these grasses that Gaby was steamrolled from the side. She landed hard, the wind knocked out of her, and looked up into the chaotic pattern of the leafy canopy as she wheezed and struggled. The dark shape of the man atop her leaned forward and consumed her sight. She closed her eyes, fighting for a breath as her shocked lungs reset themselves.

Then Solo was there. He rugby-tackled the man, leaning his shoulder into the attacker’s torso and ripping him from his place on her. She rolled over onto her belly and pushed herself up onto her elbows, looking out at the traffic just a hundred feet away, oblivious civilians walking and driving past them without a care in the world. She couldn’t call out – wouldn’t, in fact, because they wouldn’t involve random people who had the chance of getting hurt in the course of spywork. But she wished Illya was here.

Solo was losing the fight, she saw as she turned back, rocking up onto her knees. He was an excellent boxer but didn’t have the patience for wrestling; while grappled, he tended to fight with the assumption that he would eventually get the upper hand instead of working towards it. Even Gaby herself had managed to tap him out once or twice, her strong limbs pressed deep into his joints, his casual strength useless when it was up against calculated smarts. This attacker seemed to know this, and Gaby watched helplessly as he circled Solo’s close-quarters punches and got him into a mean triangle hold. She watched as the man took one hand away, dug in his jacket pocket, and came out with a syringe and needle.

“Solo!” she cried, pushing up and stumbling forward in an injured sprint. She made it to them just in time to knock into Solo’s chest, inching them backwards just a bit… but the needle went deep into Solo’s neck, and even as she went around and began to punch at the attacker she saw his eyelids flutter, the muscles around his mouth slacken. She fought, but his legs buckled, and he went to his knees. The assailant let him fall, now concentrating on Gaby. He threw a few of his own blows, but she dodged them all and kicked up into his stomach, then used the momentum of a step forward to football-kick the top of her foot up into his groin with her other leg. The man groaned at the first kick and shrieked at the second, retreating from her. Gaby mirrored him, widening the distance between them. Solo had fallen prone, his face in the grass. He wasn’t moving. She circled his body like a mother lion, forcing the attacker away from him, her hands at the ready. It appeared that neither of them had a gun.

The man surprised her with a rush forward. She was fierce and fiery and ready but small, and she wasn’t a match for him. She should’ve been carrying a stupid gun. She twirled in his grip, managing to wiggle away for an extra half second, but his other hand grabbed her upper arm through the thin material of her dress sleeve. Something painful pricked her skin. A scream died in her throat as her entire body seemed to seize up and then relax again, her muscles melting away the tension of the fight. A dreamy haze washed over her face, like a spiderweb floating on a breeze. She couldn’t keep her eyes open for more than a moment at a time, but she could feel the scratchy material of the man’s jacket as she fell against him, her cheek brushing his lapel.

“ _No_ ,” she slurred, her last conscious act before all control dissolved away. She went down to her rear and then onto her back, her legs tangled beneath her, her arms folded primly over her stomach. She couldn’t even turn her head. She was breathing slow and deep, the mechanical impulses of her brain on autopilot now. Her eyes closed. And opened again, though it was half a war. She could see some light coming from the streetlamps. Her gaze tracked it as she was moved.

The attacker was talking. Another had come. They were lifting her. Stale cigarettes, rich leather. A car interior? She was upright, leaning heavily against another body. Spicy cologne. Beneath the fog, she recognized it as Solo’s. Her eyelids closed again, and opened, and more time had passed. The car engine was on and grumbling. It needed an oil change. They went over a bump, and she and Solo jerked together. Gaby’s head fell forward, too heavy to hold up. Solo was breathing, his chest moving against the side of her face. She fought against the haze in her muscles, in her head, and lost. Her hands were tied? Loosely, with a slick rope, but still tied. Brakes squealed. She was thrown forward, impacting with the driver’s seatback, but there was no pain. Not yet. Her body settled onto Solo’s knees, with his torso jackknifed above her. She longed for the ability to at least turn, look upwards into his face. She wanted to see his face. Yelling, gunfire. Oh, _now_ they had guns. Pops as bullets impacted the metal of the car. We’re inside! she wanted to shout. Don’t shoot _us_! Solo’s breathing fluttering her hair. Please be all right. What had happened? Why were they tied up? Whose car was this? Why couldn’t she move? Shattered glass tinkling onto her legs. Her head was so heavy, so hard to lift. Shouts. Who was shooting? A creaky whine as the car door on her right opened. She was dragged. Some of the broken glass snagged her as she went, slicing long drags into her skin. A strong, warm hand around her ankle. Another around her shoulder as the last of her came out. She puddled downwards, unable to stand. Unable to lift her head. Her hands were tied. When had that happened? She was lifted. Musky cologne. Beneath the fog, she recognized it as Illya’s. Her head lolled back. More gunfire, closer this time. Tires shrieking, engine snarling. Escape. Retreat? She was put into another car, this time lying flat. This one turned on, two voices talking. They’d forgotten something. They’d… she had. She couldn’t remember. She blinked, her eyes closing after. Sleep.

 

Wake.

Gaby sat upright, preparing to launch. Her muscles were sore, like she’d run a marathon, but the adrenaline made her strong.

“Gaby!”

Illya was there. She’d been leaning on him, and he pressed up against the car door now, facing her, giving her space. “Calm down,” he said, seeing the panic in her eyes.

She scooted back, spooked, pressing up against her own door. “I… I thought.” She was breathing too quickly. She put a hand on her chest.

He waited a moment and then reached for her. She reached back, her throat tight. He embraced her, his strong arms moving tenderly. Like that time in Rome, he knew when to let touch say things he couldn’t himself. He let her settle in the car, then readjusted himself to be beside her in the seat, one of his hands placed protectively over her knee. A year ago, she wouldn’t have allowed anything like that. Today, this moment, she yearned for more.

“What happened?” she croaked. Outside it was shadowy, silent, and still. The car was parked. A faceless figure was in the front seat, turned to look at her like a visitor at a zoo.

“What do you remember?”

“Dinner. Museums. Then… nothing. The Mall? We were walking.”

“Nothing else?” Something in his voice told her that was the wrong answer.

“No. I… I was scared of something. Then… now.”

Illya was quiet and dark, the brooding he was so good at etching across his solid features as his mind calculated. Of the three of them, she considered Solo the brains, but she knew that was unkind to Illya’s abilities. He had outsmarted the KGB, after all, and the other two more than once. He had his temper and his strength, but he also had the mind of a spy, and he used it. Perhaps more than even she knew.

“What happened?” she asked again.

“You and Solo were attacked by the same man from Hawaii. Drugged. Put into the back of a car. We caught up to you and tried to stop them from getting away. We only got you out before they did. Solo is still with them.”

Gaby shook her head, the watery helplessness of her early childhood rising up behind her eyes. “I don’t remember any of that. How did you know we were in trouble?”

“Jones called us.”

The faceless figure in the front seat spoke for the first time. It was Agent Jones, one of the CIA officers who had followed them into UNCLE when Sanders had signed off on Solo joining the newborn organization. He cleared his throat gently, the nicotine in his young voice giving him the maturity he wanted. “You had shadows all night. When I saw you two start to run, I called on a payphone for backup and tried to catch up. By the time I got there you were already being loaded into their car. I, er, commandeered a car of my own to follow you. But we caught up eventually.”

She knew Solo would have been annoyed to discover that they had been assigned shadows for protection, but she was glad it had been so. Her first instinct should have been to call for help, and it was plain luck and planning on Waverly’s part that he’d had the forethought to protect his greatest officers. Solo had been blasé about the danger, casually sure that he could handle it himself, and he’d been wrong. If only Illya had been there too. She believed in both of them, trusted both of them, and felt safer with both of them.

“Where are we?”

“Just outside UNCLE. We could tell you were beginning to wake up.”

Gaby shivered. The sleeping potion had been quick to work and slow to recover from, a nightmare in memory loss and weakness. She’d never seen anything like it.

Neither, apparently, had the resident UNCLE doctor, Dr. Cecily Franke, who, like the trio, Jones, and Waverly, was a vagabond agent, sent to the wind at the whims of their superiors, following the trail of destruction the UNCLE officers wreaked in their work. Inside the D.C. headquarters, in a basement room that had been turned into a sort-of medical office, she tutted over Gaby’s condition.

“And you can’t remember anything?” she asked, repeating a question that had been posed to her several times now.

 Gaby was on the very last step on the staircase of her patience, looking down at a long drop into shutdown frustration. “No,” she said through gritted teeth. “I remember dinner, and leaving the restaurant, and fear. Nothing else. No facts, no figures.”

The medical office was crowded – doctor/patient confidentiality wasn’t a concept in UNCLE. Her boss, her coworkers, the entire medical staff, even the secretaries would know of what she’d been through. Waverly was one of many bodies in the room, and he had stayed strangely quiet during the examination. Gaby was sitting on a writing table, glaring at the rest of them in the audience facing her.

“Retrograde amnesia,” Cecily said, her head tilted slightly. Her cat-eye glasses were low now, showing off the spectacular blue of her eyes. “Whatever it was, it shuts down the hippocampus, as well as muscle coordination from the cerebrum. But I wonder if you could still hear or feel?”

Gaby didn’t answer, because she already had. She didn’t know.

“Dr. Franke,” said Waverly, finally stepping in. “Perhaps it’s time to release Gaby.”

Cecily was still muttering, transcribing notes onto a legal pad. “Obviously you retained breathing and heartrate, otherwise the dose would have been fatal. Alex,” she said, looking up as though she hadn’t heard him at all. “I’ve never come across an anaesthetic like this. It’s powerful and dangerous. It must be new, synthesized in a lab.” She was probably remembering the ordeal from last winter, when the anarchist group and Soviet spies had homegrown a virus meant to cripple Europe. Those enemies had been scientists like her, exposed and corrupted with anti-West sentiments. She had been caught in the middle of that fight, shoulder-to-shoulder with the UNCLE officers, and still bore scars. Since then, Cecily had stayed comfortably inside the secret, hidden offices of the international spy organization. Now, once again, the evils of their adversaries were catching up. Gaby had noticed Cecily’s reticence about the actual work they did defending the nations of the world – she was in it for the science, not the justice.

“We’ll tell our boys to keep their eyes open,” Waverly said. “Meanwhile, can Gaby be released?”

“What? Oh, yes, yes. I’ll want a condition check tomorrow morning.” Cecily looked up, made eye contact with Gaby for the first time in several minutes, and managed a smile. She was a cool doctor, and the two of them hadn’t bonded since her entrance into the outfit. “Please call me immediately if you notice a change in your condition. Anything at all, even a stuffed nose.”

Gaby jumped down from the table, retrieved the slippers she’d been given after somehow losing her shoes, and followed Waverly into the hall.

UNCLE’s D.C. offices were in the heart of the neighborhood called Georgetown. The building was a narrow colonial brownstone, appeared generically residential, and had so many security devices that it was routinely considered less vulnerable to intruders than the Capitol building. Waverly and several of his counterparts in other departments of UNCLE maintained offices that were small but welcoming, and it was to there that the two of them retreated.

He had been her mentor for longer than she’d known the two others of her trio put together. He was the most stable relationship she’d had since childhood. He had guided her, trained her, encouraged her. As she sat down, she hated every fiber of him so fiercely that it felt like her eyes were burning. He settled down behind his desk, picked up a teacup filled with tea that had long gone cold, and looked at her sadly.

She lowered her chin, her voice. “Tell me everything that you know, or I will walk outside and never return.”

“That would be drastic.”

Gaby wanted to spit fire. “Alexander, I am far beyond being teased-”

Waverly drank from the teacup and set it back with a clink of china. “I am not teasing. I’ll tell you what I know. Yes, everything. But I want you to understand that I did have my reasons for keeping my cards close to my chest.”

“You have three minutes before I retrieve Illya and leave.”

Waverly shook his head. “You’re still being dramatic. Anyway, Kuryakin wouldn’t leave with you.”

This was the first time that he had disappointed her with his assumptions. It stung her to realize that he still didn’t understand the quality and nature of the bond between the three, even as he made snide remarks and sent them out together on almost every mission. Gaby had no doubt in her mind that, given the choice between her and UNCLE, Illya would choose her. But that was beside the point.

“Who killed the girl in Hawaii?” she asked, resorting to an interrogation style of narrative. She asked the questions she wanted answered, and he would oblige or lose his greatest assets.

“A sniper.”

Gaby stood up and had her hand on the doorknob before he called out, “I’m going to tell it my way or not at all.”

She was back at his desk in three steps, both palms on the ink blotter, her face close to his. She didn’t have a gun and was glad for it. She snarled, “Then tell it,” and didn’t move back from his personal space.

He looked terribly unconcerned and took another sip from the cold tea. “It was a sniper from a group calling itself THRUSH.”

Gaby breathed sharply through her nose. This time, she didn’t interrupt. He would tell it his way.

“They are the men you fought against last year in London. They were also partially responsible for the trouble in Istanbul, right after Rome. Our analysts have been following puzzle pieces for months now. They call themselves the Technological Hierarchy for the Removal of Undesirables and the Subjugation of Humanity. They are anarchists, plain and simple. They want to overthrow the government and return to a time of disorder.”

“Which government?”

“All of them.”

A mantel clock on his desk tick tocked merrily. Gaby lowered herself back into her chair facing him.

“They want to kill or be killed, chaos for chaos’ sake. They’re particularly popular with the _Komitet_ who think they can control or use them, but our Soviet friends are most mistaken. THRUSH has manpower the likes you wouldn’t believe for a group you hadn’t heard of until three minutes ago. They are supported all over the world, mostly by crazy businessmen who think capitalism isn’t strong enough. They want to throw the world in a global panic and destabilize as much as they can. The worst thing is there isn’t a single leader, because of course that would go against their doctrine. It’s like a clubhouse filled with weapons, and mean little boys go in to trade and plot, each trying to outdo the other on how many rocks can be thrown at cars before the sun goes down.

“The sniper who killed our contact was most assuredly sent from THRUSH. They’re working on something in Vietnam, probably alongside or at least nearby the Soviets. Communism isn’t popular with anarchists, but the plain and simple fact is that it’s easier to overthrow governments who are in the middle of cold wars with each other and can’t be bothered to chase shadows and rumors. CIA and MI6 don’t even really believe in THRUSH’s existence – Langley and Whitehall think it’s KGB boys who are a little far off their leashes. That’s why they let Solo come over to us. He was beginning to annoy Sanders, to be honest, and he was happy to have the man off his hands. Kuryakin, at least in the beginning, was meant to be a spy within a spy agency, as you know, getting close to THRUSH so that the KGB had information they could use. If the incident in the Bahamas hadn’t gone so smoothly, we were going to stage his death ourselves before long.

"But THRUSH is very real, and very dangerous, and it’s the enemy UNCLE was created to fight. You know our higher-ups, the ones I answer to, and my boss’s boss, like to be hands off. It’s because THRUSH is everywhere, and no one knows who to trust. It’s why I use you three. I trust you, my boss trusts me, and his, and that’s pretty much the end of it.”

Gaby absorbed this quietly and with grace, if she was kind to herself. She hadn’t been a special agent for very long, but she had a knack for it. This was not the first time she’d been walloped with information likely to bring the average citizen to their knees. Her fear that she could feel coiling in her belly was mostly from the circumstances of it being past midnight on a night when she’d recently been drugged and bound. This new face for the enemy was hardly more than the polish of a name.

“Who are the men who attacked us, and why did you set shadows on us?” That was the crux of her earlier anger, and why she’d been so sure that Waverly knew more than he was letting on.

“Attempts on you had just been made,” he said simply. “It was sure to happen again, especially with Solo’s thorough humiliation of them the first time. THRUSH’s pride is easily wounded - is, in fact, their greatest weakness, which we hope to exploit. We don’t know why it was an attempt at kidnap rather than assassination, however.”

“So THRUSH is behind all of this,” she said.

“More or less. Some of it is KGB. Some of it is Nazis.” He sipped his tea in performance now, rather than from wanting. “But yes, most of what we’ve sent you on has been them. Can’t step on CIA’s or SIS’s toes.”

Gaby was still annoyed with him, but her rage was cooling. “Why didn’t you tell us all this before?”

Waverly raised his chin, for the first time in recent memory resembling the haughty and distant man who had walked into her garage and offered her a new life. That armor of his had melted soon after, as he took her under his wing and became a figure of stability and generosity in her life. She was reminded now that he was a lifelong servant of intelligence agencies whose work was secrets, betrayal, and death. It made her a bit sad. “You are UNCLE officers for action. We tell you what you need to know for the mission. Let us handle the busy work of information upon which to act.”

“You point. I shoot.”

It was what he’d told her that first day. Someday, he’d said, men would come after her. Did she want to spend the rest of her life in fear, glancing over her shoulder, ready for the end that would come too soon, or did she want to take control. Did she want to drive her own destiny. Did she want to be a part of it all.

Waverly nodded. The crow’s feet around his eyes deepened a bit, and his waistcoat wrinkled as he leaned back in his chair, which sighed as it settled. “I point. You shoot.”

The first thing Gaby did after leaving his office was to tell Illya everything that she had learned. He too was upset to know that they’d been used almost like bait and that there was even more to the story of their lives in the last year than they’d known, but he forgave Waverly’s indiscretions on the basis that he was a spy, and that’s what they did. He was still more concerned with getting Solo back, wherever he’d been taken. They canvassed, interrogated, trailed, and surveilled, but nothing came of any of it. D.C. was as vast and beehive-busy as London had been when she’d been held last winter.

 

Three weeks later they found him.


End file.
